Editorial | Of A-Rod, baseball and a real scandal

"It never occurred to me," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote almost 90 years ago, "that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people - with the singlemindedness of a burglar blowing a safe."

The Chicago Black Sox World Series cheating scandal had blown wide open five years before the author's "The Great Gatsby" touched on the nation's - or at least baseball fans' - loss of innocence in that brief passage about opportunity and those who will chase it at any cost. Maybe the writer's point was that innocence wasn't so much lost then, as stolen.

Can the same be said for today's baseball scandal, the most severe in terms of punishment since eight Chicago White Sox players threw the 1919 championship series? Those players were banned from the game for life. Today's miscreants, 13 professional baseball players, have been suspended for using performance-enhancing drugs. The most famous - and the most severely punished - is New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez, who is appealing his 211-game suspension, a move that will probably allow him to play for the rest of the season.

But we've seen this movie before, the one where the hero takes a short-cut to greatness - in sports, in politics, in business, in life. We're so far beyond "Say It Ain't So, Joe" that it's not even a surprise to discover that heart-tugging moment from the 1919 scandal was, at least according to the horse's mouth, a bit of enterprising story-telling by a journalist (ditto, short-cut to greatness cautionary tales). A lie about a cheat, how about that?

Faith is gone. Notice no one is saying "Say It Ain't So, A-Rod" these days. Wiser, if not wizened, by experience, our discussion doesn't even bother to light on the merits of the case - Mr. Rodriguez, after painful stretches of the truth, finally did admit to using PEDs - but catapults ahead to how fair the severity is, or is not, for the tanked-up Yank. Sports writers who are chronicling this fall, this disgrace, don't even bother to use the word "alleged" in their coverage. Why bother?

There is a scandal beyond the obvious one, of athletes using banned drugs to appear superhuman. They pull in what amounts to supernatural amounts of money for hitting a ball with a bat, or to catch a ball with a glove. Steroids have infected salaries, too.

Consider this.

As news outlets were reporting that each suspended game would cost Mr. Rodriguez about $150,000, some also were reporting this story:

The widow of one of the 19 "hotshot" firefighters killed in the terrible June 30 conflagration in Arizona is tangling with city officials over whether her dead husband was a full-time employee and whether his survivors are entitled to more than workman's comp and a one-time federal payment of about $320,000 - the equivalent of about two games' worth of pay for Mr. Rodriguez. Millions of dollars separate the reparations for deceased full-time and part-time firefighters.

At the time of his death, the firefighter, a father of four named Andrew Ashcraft, was 29 years old. He worked 40 hours a week. He recently had been given a raise that took him to $15.03 an hour, from $12.48.

For fighting fires. For saving lives. For paying with his own.

Say that ain't so, Joe.

Meanwhile, we're still dazzled by a game and some cheats, old sport.

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Editorial | Of A-Rod, baseball and a real scandal

'It never occurred to me,' F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote almost 90 years ago, 'that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people ? with the singlemindedness of a burglar blowing a